PRISM Analytics
PRISM is Watching “---- is as inescapable as the eyes of Echo.” - an old serf saying. In Acheron Rho it is not a coincidence to see an ad for shoes if you’ve been talking to your friends about shoes. Use a burner account for too long and it wouldn’t be odd to see your main account recommended as someone you might know. Your phone knows where you are. Your TV really is listening to you. The toaster adjusts to match your routine after a night of drinking. In Acheron Rho, the unintended consequences of social media and the internet aren’t just real or unaddressed - they’re monetized. PRISM is watching. Ask PRISM if they’re spying on you and they’ll show you a little page explaining how each permission makes one of their products possible. You can’t use social media if PRISM can’t record and display your posts - not unless your idea of connecting with others is typing words that vanish as you write them. If PRISM doesn’t know where you are, Lumen Maps can’t give you directions or predict travel times based on current levels of traffic. People love PRISM’s suggestions for what they should watch, listen, or play next. Who would want to turn that off? Everyone is aware of the eyes of Echo, it’s not a secret exactly. The problem is that most people don’t really like to think about it. It can be hard to believe that something so helpful could be working against you. If the Echonian company hadn’t been created by former secret police, or if the Empire’s minimal privacy laws weren’t treated like a highway speed limit, maybe things would be different. But Acheron Rho is a place that protects its secrets and pays to know the crimes of others. PRISM wasn’t lying when it said it was doing its best to use your data responsibly, but what is “responsibly” exactly? Echonians like to tell themselves that the mentality that created the Conséc died with Empress Ari, but their foremost company is run by people who attack the symptoms of authoritarianism without eliminating its values. The Eagle Lingers Nowhere in the Network is the legacy of the Conséc as close to the surface as it is in the Analytics division. Scratch the right coat of paint in the wrong high security building and you’ll find a government agency without a government. Everything from interrogation techniques, to rank structures, to equipment preference has been maintained and modernized for daily use by the employees of this catch-all front for PRISM’s intelligence community. Very few “analysts” would describe the situation in as many words, but most feel that PRISM follows the same patriotic mission that drove the Conséc. Follow the company line and you’d believe that analysts are a light that scours the sector. Analysts maintain the Imperial Peace, eliminate treason, burn away corruption hidden in noble places. Everything else, the blackmail, the shady deals, the ads and the media - for most analysts those are things PRISM had to do to keep the mission going. It is hard to be a light for others if your power’s out. Analytics and Intelligence The Echonian company’s covert efforts are normally organized out of PRISM Analytics, which is both a legitimate business, a cover for an information agency, and a conglomerate holding together any number of subsidiaries of unusual purpose. However, in practice the Network’s special activities are loosely divided between PRISM Analytics and PRISM Special Intelligence divisions. Analytics hoards information and discovers the people that trouble society. Intelligence takes action when knowing demands it. Intelligence is smaller, and depends on Analytics to set corporate strategy, approve missions, provide funds, and synthesize information. In turn, Analytics is too vaguely legal to take the risks that Intelligence’s plausible deniability provides. PSI is PRISM’s operations department: its agents and its companies have the kind of lethal creativity that active measures require. PRISM Analytics is the information division: analysts are responsible for collecting information and making it useful. How do I know when a company fits in Analytics? When should a character work for Intelligence? Analytics companies might be staffed by private eyes, corporate hackers, or government spooks. It all depends on what kind of information the subsidiary provides and who they provide it for. Analysts breathe a fog of intrigue and exhale secrets. But generally, employees of Analytics fit best in noir fiction and cold war drama. If you’re an artist who paints important structures, like bridges, that just happen to be owned by the enemy, you’re probably an analyst. If you visit a cafe every day around six, read a paper, maybe talk to a few loose-lipped strangers, you’re an analyst. When things go wrong for an analyst, it’s usually because a contact sold them out, a friend switched sides, or a guard spotted them slipping into a lord’s office during a party. Maybe once in a bad year, they might find themselves alone, trying to make it back to Echo after synths murdered the rest of their Section II task force and went looking for Crux’s eye-in-the-sky. Special agents are given a mission, a suit, and a set of tools. PRISM sets Intelligence companies up to be disavowed, dismantled, and redeveloped in the next building over. If PSI was a movie, it’d be a techno-thriller with gadgets and fast cars played as a triple-feature with a heist movie and a contest of assassins. When you need someone who can be given a photo, a datachip, and a goal, send a special agent. If you have a questionably owned artifact that needs to, say, find its way into an Eridanii vault, send a special agent. If the head of your research team has been kidnapped and the House can’t rely on discretion from the authorities, send a special agent. Special agents live in danger and are trained for it. Sometimes they operate with a team of specialists, sometimes they operate on their own, but they always know that PRISM gave them the training and gear they needed to succeed. Privacy™ Privacy™ is an optional clause in most PRISM contracts that allows users to pay a small administrative charge to ensure that their data is not placed up for auction or shared with interested third parties for as long as the subscription is maintained. Privacy™ protects users from people outside PRISM. Forget™ protects users from PRISM. There are several Privacy™ Levels available to users. * Level One - basic controls over what is shared with the user’s friends * Level Two - ability to request removal of specific kinds of unwanted search results, only formal data requests from general nobility will be given consideration. * Level Three - only House authorities, law enforcement, and other officials will have their data requests considered. Formal requests are required. Client may request artificial lowering of unwanted search results. * Level Four -''' Only government officials with full and legal proof that their data requests are expected to be relevant to an active government action may request access to user data. PRISM will begin a counter-suit on the user’s behalf. * 'Level Five -' A secret known only to a few: PRISM will not admit your data exists and keeps it seperate from even general data pools. This is nearly always a special arrangement and is more common among agencies and the kind of people who hire agents. Most Houses and sector-spanning companies have a few people who might know about Level Five Privacy.™ * '''Level Six (Vantablack) - A secret known only to PRISM. There are people who don’t exist outside CCB files and Eridanii tax records because PRISM erased them from all news reporting, security footage, social media, and search results. Take a picture of them with your phone, and there’d be a weird glitch that corrupts the file. People with Level Six Privacy™ are digital ghosts. The internet doesn’t recognize that they exist. Who are these people, and why do they go to such lengths to hide from the world? PRISM Mass-Data Archive Three centuries after its initial activation, the Mass-Data Archive has become a living record of nearly every human (and synthetic) life in the sector. Built as a SIGNET subsystem by the Conséc, the Mass-Data Archive's proprietary VIs automatically associate digital activity, camera observations, social interactions, and crimes with individual IDs. Your own embarrassing secrets have a high chance of being hidden away somewhere in the archive of everything PRISM has recorded anywhere in the sector. If PRISM had the resources to look at every secret and follow up on every flagged event in the Mass-Data Archive, the Empire would be a very different place. As it is, large sections of Analytics exist for the sole purpose of combing through the MDA and building VIs that scan through the archive faster than they ever could. When people say that PRISM exists to turn data into money, they’re usually talking about services made possible by the archive. Multiple smaller instances of the MDA exist in most star systems, usually as relatively tiny datasets associated with PRISM’s products (like the location history of every Lumen Maps user on Yakiyah during the last three months, or the search history of every signed in user over the last week). Product archives remain extremely fast, helping PRISM’s various tech services keep up with demand, and they add robustness to the MDA system. More of what’s necessary to operate stays local when it needs to. However, all local archives automatically send their contents back to Echo on a schedule timed so that records arrive about six weeks after recording. Unless Analytics knows to look for something or has an alert set to track an individual or specific event type, it usually takes another three-to-six months for an entry-level analyst on Echo to conduct a manual review and log any given incident. The Mass-Data Archive was built to enable government control at the highest levels. Censorship is in its bones and the data classification settings are so fine-grained that PRISM lets anyone with too much time on their hands rummage through the low security sections, collecting bounties on scandals and finders fees for obscure historical trivia. The MDA doesn’t show its full self even for analysts and other high-security personnel. Only executive editors with the right kind of pull are granted unrestricted access, and PRISM’s oligarchs don’t extend that kind of access lightly, even to each other. After all, the Mass-Data Archive represents the sum total of three centuries of continuous mass surveillance. Wouldn’t you be cautious about who you gave the keys? Category:The Prism Network